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Professor slams 'violent' books in Trinidad schools

Anonymous Patron writes "From Trinidad News, in Trinidad and Tobago , Professor Selwyn Cudjoe said on Saturday that the literature being used in schools is contributing to violence. In his speech, Prof Cudjoe said that development could not be measured in terms of income or wealth in terms of what kind of society we want to create by 2020 and asked the question how could our education system contribute to development.

He said, "Half the young people in schools are asked to read Shane, which is one of the violent books in American history. It perpetuates a culture of violence.""

Comments

In a discerning op-ed piece in the New York Times author Patrick Cooke made a parallel observation: If young Americans have seen tens of thousands of murders on TV, surely, he commented, they have seen even more acts of kindness. On sitcoms, romantic comedies, moveins of the week, soaps, medical dramas, and even on police shows, people are constantly falling in love and hleping each other out. The characters on most prime-time shows "share so much peace, tolerance and understanding
that you might even call it gratuitous harmony," Cooke observes. Why not conclude, he asks, that TV encourages niceness at least as much as violence? --Barry Glasser, The Culture of Fear, pg 42-43

The crap about violence in a book stems from a one-sided view of the book; not from a view of the book as a whole.